Yellow rack server - VM host

The 2U yellow google-branded server in the rack seems to be dead. I don’t know much about it, other than it was running a VM that we were using to log metrics from the laser cutter. I think it was donated and set up by @SteveRoy a few months back?

If anyone knows more about this machine than me, I would be grateful if you could either get it working again, or perhaps recover the block device of our laser metrics VM so that I can recover the historical laser data (2 months worth) and migrate it. If it’s not easy, then no big deal I guess.

Symptoms

On Thursday I noticed that our VM was down. It has an IP of 172.16.0.161, but wasn’t responding to pings, ssh, or the InfluxDB ports that should have been running on it

According to the wiki, the VM host has an IP of 172.16.0.245, but it wasn’t responding either.

I fought my way to the back of the server rack and plugged in a keyboard and monitor. No response. So I power cycled it. Halfway through booting, it got to some sort of loop…

image

Shit. That doesn’t sound good…
Can you access bios though?

I did nothing more than what I outlined above. I’m not about to muck with something that someone else set up without first asking for a bit of background info (ie: this post). For all I know, someone else has already started working on fixing this.

It seemed to POST fine, initialized some disk controllers, then started to boot into Vmware EXSI, and then got stuck in this loop.

I’ll take a look this week when I am at the space

Thanks! Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.